What SOC Analysts Actually Do in Their First Hour on Shift

Every Security Operations Centre (SOC) looks different on paper—Splunk here, Microsoft Sentinel there, a wall of dashboards, a queue that never sleeps. But the first hour on shift follows a familiar rhythm. If you are breaking into SOC work or training for your first analyst role, understanding that rhythm matters more than memorising every log field on day one.

This is how practitioners actually work: not as alert-clicking robots, but as investigators balancing speed, evidence, and business risk.

1. Shift handover: context before clicks

Before touching a single ticket, analysts read the handover notes from the previous shift. What incidents are still open? Which detections are known false positives? Did the network team push a change overnight that might spike firewall logs?

Context prevents rework. A surge in authentication failures might look like an attack—until you learn that a legacy application was redeployed and is retrying with bad credentials. Good SOCs document that in the handover so the next analyst does not burn an hour re-investigating solved noise.

What to capture mentally:

Open severity-1 or severity-2 incidents

Scheduled maintenance windows

New detection rules were deployed in the last 24 hours

Threat intelligence feeds flagged as high confidence

2. Queue triage: severity, age, and asset criticality

The alert queue is rarely empty. Analysts do not work strictly first-in-first-out. They triage using severity (from playbooks), age (stale high-severity items may mean a missed breach window), asset criticality (domain controllers and payment systems outrank lab VMs), and confidence (correlated alerts across SIEM, EDR, and email often beat isolated low-fidelity rules).

Triage is not an investigation. The goal in the first pass is to decide: ignore with documented reason, monitor, investigate now, or escalate immediately.

3. Enrichment: turning an alert into a story

An alert title like “Suspicious PowerShell” is a starting point, not a conclusion. Analysts enrich it by asking who (user, host, IP), what (parent process, command line, hash), when (first/last seen, business hours), where (segment, cloud tenant, geography), and how (phishing, RDP, exploit if visible).

In a SIEM, enrichment often means pivoting from one field to related events—authentication, process creation, DNS, outbound connections—in a time window around the trigger. Indicators of Compromise (IPs, domains, hashes) get checked against threat intelligence. A match does not always mean breach; it means prioritise and verify.

4. False positives vs. true positives

SOC maturity is partly measured by handling false positives without tuning away real threats. Scanners, IT automation, and misconfigured cloud storage often generate noise. Analysts document false positives so detection engineers can tune rules.

True positives often show clustering: same user, multiple hosts, unusual hours, follow-on actions (e.g., credential dumping after initial access). One weak signal plus two corroborating events is a classic escalation pattern.

5. When to escalate—and to whom

Escalation typically happens when there is evidence of active compromise or lateral movement, privileged or critical assets are involved, data loss or regulatory notification may be required, or containment needs actions outside the SOC (disable accounts, isolate hosts, block domains).

Escalation paths vary: Tier 2, incident commander, CISO, external IR. The key is clear communication—timeline, affected assets, what you ruled out, and what you still need.

6. Documentation

Every meaningful decision should leave a trail: hypothesis tested, queries run, conclusion (benign, suspicious, confirmed), next owner, and deadline. That supports audits, post-incident reviews, and training the next cohort.

7. Tools you will touch

You do not need every platform on day one, but know each role: SIEM for correlation and alerting; EDR for endpoint telemetry; email security for phishing and BEC; ticketing/SOAR for workflow; threat intel for IoC and TTP context. MITRE ATT&CK helps describe attacker behaviour in a language that defenders share globally.

Building the habit

SOC analysis is structured curiosity: handover → triage → enrich → decide → document. The tools change; the discipline does not. Practise on lab alerts, time-box investigations, and learn to articulate why you closed a ticket—not only that you closed it.

CyTek Academy’s SOC training covers SIEM use cases, incident response, and hands-on labs with Splunk, Wireshark, MITRE ATT&CK, and Linux log analysis—for beginners and career switchers who want production-grade skills, not slide decks alone.